Beloved: On the Shadows that Haunt Us
This book has been hard. Morrison manages to fill every word with so much intention and detail that one can easily get swept away and overwhelmed by trying to uncover every hidden message. The content is brutal. Slavery. Murder. Infanticide. Rape. Try to digest it all at once and it will become lodged in your throat, cutting off your airway, disorientating you at best, shutting you down at worst. Beloved has an intended audience, I believe, but not those of African American descent- the legacies of the tortured slaves that Morrison focuses on. I believe Morrison wrote this book to spear the veil of our imaginations and preconceptions of slavery; our education shows us the objective facts of slavery, heres how many, heres how they lived, heres what rights they were stripped of. But a textbook cannot teach the story, and that is where Beloved rises to take its place. For most people, this is the meaning they will take from the novel, and I commend them for it. However, I believe there is